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Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm
Half-day Tutorials

The Mindset Change for the Agile Tester

On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started, or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. In agile, testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, where their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them. Janet Gregory shares ways to change the tester’s mindset from “How can I break the software?” to “How can I help deliver excellent software?”—a critical mental shift on agile projects. Another facet of the mind-set change is learning how to test early and incrementally. Janet uses interactive exercises and examples to help you understand how effective this mindset change is—and how you can apply it on your agile projects.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development.

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